The Achieve Podcast - Emil Abedian (Counsel CPAs)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Emile Abaden, the CEO and founder of Council CPAs, and you can find them at councilcpas.com. Emil, thank you for joining us today.

Pleasure, Taylor Baker Baker. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. And for those getting to know you and the niche that you're in and you're serving, give us the backstory real quick on how you got into this space and who you're taking care of.

Yeah. Yeah. So right now we work exclusively with law firms across the country with their accounting, tax, tax planning, and law firm management needs. But that's not where we started. Obviously, you start somewhere and then you kind of evolve the operation and the business to somewhere where you feel more comfortable with. When I first started my business back in 2009, I was just happy that the phone was ringing. Back then, the phones were actually still ringing. Now it's all in the email and all of that. But people were actually talking over the phone back then. So I was just taking on whatever clients. I just need to make a living and also provide for my family. So I was taking on any client. But you pretty quickly realize that that's not a way to build a business. You can't serve whoever needs your services. I mean, that's not gonna build a sustainable operation. That might create a good practice or a good, well-paying job for you, for yourself, but not a sustainable or scalable operation. So gradually as we kind of move on, we started working more and more with law firms. And why law firms? Honestly, just happened to happen. It was just a coincidence that it ended up being law firms. But when I started working a little bit more with law firms, I realized that they needed more, more than just accounting or more than just tax preparation. They need more, they want, they were craving this consultation advisor services, their insights, So we went more and more into it, deeper and deeper, until, uh, I mean, maybe 2 years ago or so, where we decided to separate our operation into divisions. One where we were focusing only on law firm clients, and another one that was doing just the general businesses. And I didn't like that because it was creating too much Myself, I was pulling in two different directions, so I decided to kind of get rid of my non-law firm client operation and just focus, put all my eggs into the legal industry and help law firms scale. So that's where we are. A year and a half ago is where I decided to kind of go 100% into the legal industry. Okay.

And how big is the team and organization now?

I mean, we were— I took a small team with me from the other operation. We're 3 people, 4 with me at that time. Right now we're 13. Nice. So we've been growing pretty steadily in the last year and a half, and this has all been organically. We're just trying to build the systems and processes around the legal industry. Where we are right now, we feel very comfortable with what we built. So now is the time for us to really scale this to a different level. And push, push it because the foundation is right. The system processes is right. We know exactly what we're offering our clients and it's based on what we think is the best for the client. And it might not be the best for all law firms from their perspective. So it just got to fit the, fit the model. And if it does, it works really, really well. We rarely get unhappy clients because it's structured. It's not based on 10, 15, 20 different industries and hundreds of different client needs. Yeah, different clients' needs, but it's structured in a way because typically when clients come to it, they don't know any better. They just think they need tax return and bookkeeping. But when you explain to them that this— I can do this, we can do this because of these reasons. I do your bookkeeping not because I want to do your bookkeeping, but I do the bookkeeping because I see the numbers on a regular basis and can advise you on the numbers. Instead of you sending the numbers at the end of the year and I plug it into the tax software and spit out a tax return for you, for example.

Yes, that makes so much sense. The holistic approach to it.

It's holistic approach. Yeah, it's—

Okay, and so what's been driving growth for you guys lately?

I mean, the specialization has been— I mean, I wish I did it a long time ago. It's been mind-blowing how how fast it goes when you just do one thing and one thing good. Yeah. Just as a comparison, it took us about 15 years with my other firm to build what we have built in a year and a half.

Wow.

With this, with Council CPAs. Wow. So it's, it's obviously I've done it already up to this point. It was easy for me because I'd done this with the other firm. Yeah. But with the other firm, at this point I was feeling stuck. I didn't really know how to take it to the next level. But with my Council CPAs firm, the other firm was Abedian and Totlian, by the way, it was just CPA firm, but just for general practice, general client. This firm where we are right now is where we stopped with Abedian and Totlian. And I feel like we're just starting with Council CPAs. This is just touching the surface. Wow. So, it's a— that's been mind-blowing for me. I mean, specialize and do one thing, and your marketing becomes a lot easier because you understand your client. You talk your client's language. When I jump on a sales call or a prospect who calls me, most of the time I don't even need to ask questions because I know 99% of the time what they're going to tell me, what they're what their problems are. I just have to give them a solution. Wow. So that's been the biggest, biggest kind of advantage for us.

It's amazing what happens with clarity.

Clarity. That's exactly, you nailed it. It's clarity. Clarity from everybody, from my perspective, from the leader, from my team's perspective, they know exactly what they need to offer to clients and how we offering it. And from client, they know exactly what they're getting from us. Exactly.

I would love that. So what turning points for you have molded the way you think about and run the organizations?

I mean, you get to a point, I mean, maybe not everybody, but I think you grow up at one point, you're just building, building, building, and then one day you wake up, okay, what am I doing this? I mean, yes, it's fun to do this, but there got to be a purpose. And when you work 70, 80, 90 hours a week, which I was doing for the longest time, And when you have young kids at home, you know, calling you on the phone, "Dad, are you coming home?" and you can't really leave, that's kind of a light, light that bulbs and a bulb that light up. And I started thinking, I can't do this. I mean, I can't work 80 hours, 90 hours a week just to do this. First of all, it got to be fun. I need to wake up and feel, feel that I'm burning for this. Yes. I'm going to be frank, tax is not the sexiest profession in the world, but running an accounting firm, it could be any business, but running it and building it and feeling that you're scaling and you have teams, leadership, that's what really the fun portion. So that's when I started thinking, I can't do this. I need to change. Obviously, it didn't happen overnight. It does not happen overnight. And I know a lot of us, including myself, wanted it to happen overnight. But it's just evolution. It's step by step. You start with kind of maybe with your general practice. I started kind of shaving off clients that was not a good fit, even though we're doing multiple industries, but the client type was not the right fit. So we shaved off some clients. That was a wake-up call for us also because you're scared initially to get rid of clients. You think your income will go down, your profit will go down. But when you do that, it opens up so much time for you to bring in clients that really understand you, like you, and appreciate you. So that was the first step. And then gradually we increased and moved over and started doing just law firm clients.

Okay. And what do you feel like has helped you to attract and retain those good clients?

I mean, again, going back to the specialization, we understand them. And before they— even when we start working with them, I mean, the sales process is one thing. By the way, we don't do any sales. Like, I talk to them, I tell them what I can do, I just let them know, and I walk away. I mean, if I do a good job explaining how we can provide value, that's the sales itself. But thereafter, you got to keep them happy. Obviously, it's not just to bring them on board and call it a day. And the way we do it is we kind of— by far, we're not a tech company. I'm not— I'm very not tech savvy. At all, even though we're getting in more and more into AI. But I want to compare us to, let's say, Apple, right, with their iPhones. Every year when this bloody iPhone comes out, there's a line outside of Apple. People want to buy this phone. It's the same bloody phone and everybody wants it. Why is that? It's because every year there's something new. The camera gets a little bit better, the sound gets a little bit better. I don't know, it gets a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller. The design is That's what I think it's important for service providers also to realize that you gotta keep adding. You can't just continue doing what you're doing over and over and over and over again. So my biggest thing is value. We got to provide value. It doesn't matter how much we charge our clients. It could be $1,000 a month. It could be $10,000 a month. There's a wide range of clients. But from the $1,000 a month to the $10,000 a month, They need to get value from us. And every year the value need to keep increasing. We are adding on, for example, insight reporting. The reports have to get nicer. The reports have to get more valuable, more detailed. And this is not something you can, I can just generalize for all my clients because what's important for you is not important for me or vice versa. So we sit down with them and really understand their needs, what they're looking at, for us to be able to build those reports based on your situation. Obviously, working with only attorneys makes it a lot easier. But still, up to now at least, we still work with all kinds of practice areas in the legal industry.

Okay.

You could even niche it down even more and just do one or two different practice areas. And be even more specialized. We're not there yet. I'm not there yet. Maybe it will come. But those are the things that I think service providers sometimes miss. And just because I offer bookkeeping and tax, that's all I'm going to offer the rest of my life. No, I mean, you got to keep— your clients are craving more and more, especially in today's society. I mean, it goes fast. You don't do it, someone else will do it.

Yes. So with your sales and marketing, where do you still see opportunity or money on the table?

I mean, most of our marketing is done on LinkedIn. By the way, we don't do any paid advertising yet. It's all organic, just sharing value, short videos, emails, clips, just to give value, just keep on giving. I mean, I think that's a very, very important thing for service providers as CPAs, lawyers, to keep giving and show your audience your expertise, and it will come. It just comes. I mean, we could probably do a lot better job on kind of tracing where our leads come from, but the amount of leads we get today compared to 2 years ago with Avadian and Totlian is probably 10 times more or 15 times more. Wow. Yeah, it's a significant, significant jump in leads coming in. Compared to before. As before, because we talk your language, we talk our client language, and I'm only talking to you and I'm not talking to a doctor, a dentist, an architect, a contractor, restaurant owner. I'm talking to you as a law firm owner. Mm-hmm. I think I'm not a marketing person by far, but I think that's been the key benefit for us.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Now, you'd mentioned AI. Where have you guys found ways internally to utilize it?

Yeah, I mean, AI is keeping me up at nights because it's so much and it gives me anxiety sometimes because I feel like, you know, we need to get into it and we need to do it well. We have a long way to go, but we started with it internally. We haven't really utilized AI too much for our client service deliveries. But it's more from internal perspective where we kind of our own reporting team efficiency for us, uh, just internal reports that we pull. It's a lot faster us to pull this reports than it was just even 6 months ago. So for now we're utilizing for internal perspective, but we are talking to a bunch of AI providers specifically for the accounting industry to be able to utilize and implement it in a secure way because that's a big, big challenge with AI right now. I mean, you can't just plug in a client's financial statement in ChatGPT and ask it for help. I know you can't do that because then you release— I don't know what's in the backend, but I don't want to risk that. So we really want to make sure it's a closed environment. It's on our computers with our IT department and cybersecurity department to really oversee that before we launch it. But that's coming next. I mean, You're talking about maybe months. I mean, just from where we were 3 months ago, it's gone so fast and it's mind-blowing what it does.

Yeah, it's impressive. And to your point, so much information, it's like drinking from a fire hose.

Yeah, you got to drink it fast.

Yeah, exactly. Just keep coming in. So when you look at the trajectory of the business, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve, over the next 90 days, what would it be?

90 days. I mean, hiring has been a big challenge for us, uh, with even with the prior, prior firm, uh, specifically now with our specialized services, we need more specialized accountants, uh, so it's been, it's been very, very challenging, but we, I think we found, we found the solution right now. So what we're doing Instead of really sticking to the old traditional model, you have to come into the office. I'm an old school guy and I always want my team to come into the office. Even during COVID we stayed home for a while, but most thereafter we came in. But we opened up that door. I realized that I need to change my ways and open up the door. So we hiring not offshore necessarily, but remote employees. That makes sense. That really solved it. But that doesn't answer your question. That we already all looks like we're solving it. But 90 days, it's a little bit too short to say AI. I don't think that's realistic to solve the AI problem in 90 days. But if you would say in the next 12 months, I would say AI, definitely. I find a really safe and secure way to implement AI and make our work more efficient. And it's not to reduce our manpower. Absolutely not. I think the opposite. I think we actually need to increase our manpower. But to do the right things rather than doing the data entry work, spending, wasting time on things, pulling reports. If you can do that, then we're going back to our Apple example, then our team will have so much more time to start talking to our clients a lot more, providing that little bit extra value that we're looking for.

Yes, I love that.

3 months is a little bit short, so I want to be realistic, but 12 months, definitely, I think we can get there. And that's what I would like to solve.

Awesome. So when you look back at your own journey, what— and the wins, the mistakes— what lessons stand out to you?

Mm, I wish I could go back and just fix all of them. I would be a millionaire by now. I mean, number one thing that I'm always thinking about, I wish I knew better to specialize from day one. I mean, that sucked many years out of me to do everything for anybody who asked for my help, even though they were paying. I mean, that's not it. That's not the question. But you're not building a business by doing everything for anybody. Yeah. So I— the biggest mistake I did was to do that and not specialize from day one. On the other hand, it's easy to say. I mean, I didn't know any better, so I couldn't have specialized at that time because I didn't know the importance of specializing. But if I had someone older than me that could have told me, I wish I had, then that's what I would have to go back and fix.

That makes a lot of sense. Again, back to your clarity thing in the beginning. It's like when you have that clarity, your specialization, you're focused in on there, you can add.

I think I'm always thinking about because I was always looking at, so why are these old coaches talking about your business plan, for example, right? Why is it important? You just do run business, you do business and move on. But it gives you the clarity you're talking about. You need a business plan not to have a piece of paper or 10 pages or whatever just to have it there or give it to the bank, just to give yourself a clarity of what am I looking, where am I right now, where do I want to be, and then what steps do I need to make to get there. Same thing with accounting. I mean, you're doing the bookkeeping because you need to see where your structure is, your business is going to make the right decisions throughout. Because if you don't have the number, it's like trying to lose weight without knowing what your weight is right now. How are you going to get where you want to go where you don't know where you are right now? So it's super important. Clarity. I love it. I didn't pinpoint the clarity word, but that's what it is. I'm going to start using that more if you allow me.

Yeah, no, you're the one that brought it up. So no, I love what you're saying though, because In the past, you were limited to geographics as like, who is around me and what are their needs? But now with the services you're talking about, you can go nationwide. So you can say, this is the need that I service, regardless of what state you're in. I specialize in this niche and that clarity. I love that.

And it's not, it's not, and you got it. When you do that, you really have to feel comfortable with saying no to clients. Yeah, because it's hard as a professional. It's really hard to say no. And but this is what I do. And just because you don't fit in this doesn't mean that you're a bad person, bad client, or I'm a bad person or a bad CPA. We're just not a good fit. There are millions of other firms out there that might do specializing what you're looking for. So you just got to find that. That's a good fit for you.

I love that. So last question for you. When you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

We blowing this up, Taylor. I want to blow up Council CPAs. I'm so excited. I'm sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and just dreaming. And my wife thinks I'm crazy and maybe I am crazy. But our goal, we started already. I mean, we have clients across the country, but our goal is to start having physical locations across the country. Not that we need physical locations because everything is done here in Zoom, but we want to be there for our clients, for the ones that feel more comfortable with, you know, having not an online business, but it's our cloud business, but have physical locations. So I— my next— our next step here is to start, start opening up locations across the country. And utilize AI as much as we can for the client's best, not because of us. We will probably incur more expenses. AI is not cheap. Whoever thinks that you will cut expenses with AI, I think they're wrong. It is pretty expensive, but you will give so much more to your clients and you become the sticky service provider that they're looking for.

Yes, I love that. And you are correct, AI is not cheap and it can cost not just monthly services, but in mistakes and all the things that you're, you're aware of, your security, all these things that you're thinking about, which is good to be ahead of that.

I mean, that's a misconception. I think people think just because you get into AI, your profit margins will skyrocket. Maybe it will because I'm not there yet. I, I actually think that's going to cost you more than what your cost is right now. But since you've got to provide a lot better service, then your rate can go up, which is fine because you're providing so much more. I'd rather pay $100 for something that's worth $1,000 than paying $10 for something that's worth $1. So I'm sure lawyers out there are thinking the same way also. So just keep giving and giving and giving, and it'll come back at the end of the day.

I love that. So for those who want to learn more, who want to get involved, who want to reach out and connect with you guys? LinkedIn, obviously, but the website as well, counselscpas.com. Anywhere else you want to send them?

I mean, come to my LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn every day. I live there. I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn, so I respond to all of them except for if they're trying to sell me stuff. So if you message me on LinkedIn, I will respond to you, or come to our website, counselscpas.com. There's a lot of valuable information We're sending out blogs, emails. My thing is, again, value. Keep giving value and it will— you will build a sustainable operation.

I love that. Thank you so much. And thank you for coming on, Emil, and sharing your passion, knowledge, and wisdom. Amazing.

Thank you, Taylor Baker Baker. Thank you for having me.

And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode: Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses, And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure about your bookkeeping, your accounting, reach out to Emil and team and they can get you dialed in and really take care of your needs. So reach out and we'll see you in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.